Thursday, February 12, 2015

John Stossel warns
us that the central planners who want to regulate
the Internet will ruin it in the process, and he provides us with
examples of other things ruined or made impossible by central
planning:

Eighty years ago, it took workers only 15 months
to build the Empire State Building. But this century, using vastly
superior construction equipment, building the new World Trade Center
took 10 times as long. Eighty years ago, some trains ran faster than
100 miles per hour, but now even the "high-speed" Acela train averages
only 90 miles per hour because government safety rules demand that
American trains be heavier.

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel
says the current state of regulation should frighten us: "You would
not be able to get a polio vaccine ... approved today." He's
right. The first batch of Salk vaccine gave polio to 40,000 people. If
that happened today, the FDA would immediately stop the
research. Salk's vaccine would not have had a chance to save thousands
of lives and prevent so much misery.

Stossel notes that
central planning interferes with the spontaneous order of the economy,
which he likens to that in many daily situations, such as a crowded
ice skating rink. Indeed, as we see below, Stossel once tried to
direct traffic on a skating rink and failed miserably, as did an
Olympian with more expertise. Stossel notes that the "planning" fails
because, "no 'planner' knows the wishes and skills of individual
skaters better than skaters themselves".

The ice skating rink is the Internet. The rink with a "regulator" is our 'net on regulations.

The ice skaters in the video
complain of a lack of freedom and fun with central planning, and an
economist later in the video notes that the order that was disrupted
had come from the bottom up. All this reminds me of -- and beautifully
concretizes -- a quote from the economist George Reisman I
have used here on several occasions:

The overwhelming
majority of people have not realized that all the thinking and
planning about their economic activities that they perform in their
capacity as individuals actually is economic planning. By the same
token, the term "planning" has been reserved for the feeble efforts of
a comparative handful of government officials, who, having prohibited
the planning of everyone else, presume to substitute their knowledge
and intelligence for the knowledge and intelligence of tens of
millions, and to call that planning. [bold added]

I think
the video of John Stossel (or Brian Boitano) directing traffic on a
rink is an image that deserves to be disseminated widely in the face
of the latest push to "regulate" the Internet. To borrow from an old anti-drug
PSA, that ice-skating rink "is our 'net on regs". Stossel notes that regulation supporter Hillary Clinton is a
self-described "government junkie". Many junkies are also pushers, so
I think the analogy is apt on multiple levels.